You could argue that it’s unfair–or at least unrealistic–to review Google’s Knol in its current form. After all, the Wikipedia-like service just went public a little over a month ago. It takes time to build a build a repository of the world’s knowledge, even if it’s less than comprehensive: Wikipedia surely wasn’t really ready for prime time six weeks after it was launched in 2001. As a Google service, Knol could end up being in beta for years.

On the other hand, as I said back in July, I think Knol is a neat idea. When it launched, it sported an oddball collection of entries that skewed heavily towards covering diseases. I was curious to see how much progress it had made in the interim. So I checked in today…and was startled by what I found. Depressed, actually.

I started by searching for ten topics (selected off the top of my head) that have extensive entries on Wikipedia to see if Knol had anything to say about them:

Knol returned an entry for only one of these, Impressionism–and it was a perfunctory 500-word article with no examples of the art movement. (Wikipedia has four thousand words and more than two dozen illustrations.)

I couldn’t believe that Knol went one-for-ten on my little test. And so I tried again, thinking that I’d done something wrong or encountered some weird glitch. It was then that I noticed a message that appeared at the end of Knol searches:

The message didn’t explain exactly what matches Knol was withholding, or why. But I tried clicking on it–and discovered that Knol did have entries for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sarah Palin, and Steve Wozniak. It just doesn’t show them by default when you search for those subjects. Why? I can’t imagine. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Google do search and do it amazingly badly.

The Buffy entry at Wikipedia is a classic example of Wikipedia being simultaneously incredibly useful and a little scary: It goes on and on and on, and has 119 footnotes. Knol has 123 words on the series, which don’t even mention that it was based on a movie: I know virtually nothing about Buffy, and even I knew that.

The entries on Palin and Woz, however, were much more detailed. Suspiciously detailed, in fact–and they carried the obsessive-but-generic earmarks of the Wikipedia prose style. Could they have been lifted from Wikipedia, at least in part?

The Knol version of the Woz article was nearly identical to Wikipedia’s entry, but not entirely so: I noticed that it didn’t mention his August marriage, indicating that it drew from an out-of-date version of the Wikipedia piece.

But the most striking thing about Knol’s entry on Sarah Palin is this: It rightly identifies her as the current governor of the state of Alaska. But except for the cryptic note “Sarah Palin VP of John McCain” at the very top of the entry, it doesn’t mention that she’s also the presumptive Republican nominee for the vice presidency of the United States of America.

Actually, it’s worse than that–it says there had been rumors she might be McCain’s running mate, but that she wasn’t really a contender because of an ethics probe against her:

A tad inaccurate and out of date, no? Especially considering that the entry was added to Knol on August 29th, the day Palin became McCain’s running mate.

Much of the power of Wikipedia, of course, comes from its collaborative nature. And within moments of news breaking such as McCain picking Palin, you can be sure that someone will add it to the appropriate Wikipedia entries. When someone makes a mistake in a Wikipedia piece–and it happens all the time–there’s a good chance someone else will come along and fix it.

Knol is fundamentally different: It’s designed to hold entries written by individuals. “[No] one else can edit your knol (unless you permit it) or mandate how you write about a topic,” states the Knol entry about Knol. Which means that information that’s inaccurate or stale may stay so forever–you gotta think that if the person who added the Knol on Sarah Palin hasn’t gone back to update it by now, there’s a strong chance that he’s lost interest.

Which brings up the “authors” of the two entries which crib from Wikipedia: The Palin one is credited to Sam Goldfarb and the Woz one to Jean Jacques Frapsauce (actually “jean jacques frapsauce”.) It’s possible that these gents contributed to the Wikipedia articles that they appear to have cut-and-pasted into Knol, but they certainly weren’t solely responsible for them. They’re taking credit for the work of others, and because their Knol versions of the entries aren’t editable, they’re not just copies of Wikipedia’s entries–they’re fundamentally flawed copies.

Goldfarb and Frapsauce, in other words, would seem not to be the “experts who know their stuff” who Google wants to use Knol, as explained in Steve Levy’s story on the site. Knol has a mechanism for verifying the identities of those who publish articles in it, but it can’t really identify them as experts. It can’t even stop them from pasting in content from Wikipedia or elsewhere. (Knol has a “Flag inappropriate content” link, but there’s no indication that it occurred to Google that plagiarism might be a problem: You can say that an article contains sexually explicity content or hate speech or spam, but not that it isn’t original.)

Knol also lets users rate the articles, which is presumably one of the “multiple cues that help you evaluate the quality and veracity of information” mentioned in the Knol documentation. But the Palin entry has five stars, and while the Woz one has no stars, it’s not clear whether that means it’s lousy, or just that nobody has voted yet. In fact, Knol doesn’t indicate how many people voted at all, which is a major omission: There’s a big difference between one person giving the Palin entry five stars and fifty people doing so.

Okay, so much for the ten subjects I tried to research on Knol. My luck was so poor that I went back to the Knol homepage in search of better entries. That homepage has five “Featured Knols” up top, the most prominent of which is about diabetic dog food. They’re pretty good. Then there are a few dozen more Knols in a section with the cryptic title “Plain ol’ bag o’ knols.” Is that section made up of popular Knols? Ones selected by Google as good examples? Utterly random ones? I dunno.

I browsed through the Plain ol’ bag o’ knols and noted the following:

–The first Knol in the “bag” is by the Woz entry’s Jean Jacques Frapsauce; it’s on the Beijing Olympics, speaks of them in the future tense, and cribs from Wikipedia;

–A link to a Knol on The Simpsons leads to a page that says “The requested knol is currently not published,” as did a link for something called “Planning Beyond the Numbers”;

I really hope that the bag o’ knols is not a spotlight on the best the site has to offer–but such a spotlight would be really helpful.

Oh, and one other note: I searched for a Knol I was actively looking forward to reading: The one that Steve Levy’s article says that Knol founder Udi Manber has written on New Yorker cartoonist Peter Arno. It’s not there yet. Wikipedia’s Arno entry remains inadquate, but at least it exists.

“…Google is better at getting things started than finishing them. Services like Google Base and Google Page Creator remain rough drafts at best, eons after they debuted. Even a company with resources as vast as Google can’t do everything and do everything well.”

Knol’s content will surely grow exponentially in the months to come, but quantity is only one issue. Quality needs to get better, too–a Knol that’s filled with swill would be pretty dismaying, and the site in its current form shows that the emphasis on individual authors creates problems that Wikipedia doesn’t have. Basic functionality needs to get better, too: The Knol search engine in its current form seems to be broken, and I think it needs better features for separating wheat from chaff. And I’d give the Knol homepage a major overhaul that helps people find the best Knols rather than featuring some really bad ones.

I still think Knol is a cool idea. If real experts show up and fill it up with the authoritative articles it’s designed to hold, it could be a wonderful resource. But for now, I’m not making any predictions about when or if that’ll happen…

I have written a few knols for my day job. (Currently unpublished, though at one point they were publicly available)

You are correct about the search function, it is terrible. I cannot believe this is a Google site. What I finally discovered was that if you want your entry to be searchable for a particular term you actually have to put it in the title. (?!) This results in the kind of twisted keyword-centric writing Google generally tries to discourage in their guide for webmasters.

I don’t get it. And as someone who actually has to write these things, I hate it.

For a time the first entries that would pop up on my topic were all plagiarized (written by “John Smith” and intended to drive traffic to an Eastern European website) I used the flagging function and explained the problem (did note this wasn’t an option on the flag form). It did seem to work, they were removed.

Hi Harry McCracken, this is Michael McNally, the lead engineer on knol.google.com.

Thank you for your write-up and for your honest and well intentioned criticism. We do read a fair amount of what is blogged about Knol, but have limited time to respond.

A number of the specific issues you mention have been noted as bug reports or feature requests, and are wending their way through our release process.

We are constantly working to encourage the creation and discoverability of high quality content, and we look forward to many changes in the coming weeks and months that should make knol.google.com an increasingly useful site.

My major complaint with wikipedia was and is that they will not allow any commercial linking! I wrote an entire wikibook on DIY household goods moving and they would not allow me to keep one lousy external link to my website on it! So I’m done with contributing any more there and I’m doing it all over again here where interested parties can link to all of my stuff.

Don’t get me wrong, I love wikipedia’s content and I use it all of the time, linking to their articles frequently. But their refusal to allow at least 1 external commercial link to an originating author’s website galls me.

I view Google’s knols as wikipedia 2.0 because of its ease of use and better options for authors. Yes, some are going to try to game it for commercial advantage but then rules just need to be established to stop them, just as Google’s search engine has done.

Google, please do not let this die! It is much better than wikipedia, as well it should be considering its benefit from wikipedia’s years of service goodness and flaws. Just listen and respond well to your commenter’s advice as quickly as possible.

You’ve started a better mousetrap and if you go on to perfect it, the world will beat a path to it to fully utilize it.

Google Knol is a nightmare. I posted 60+ knols, all based on material I had the copyright for, but polished (with added links) for Google Knol. All my knols were deleted without explanation. Comments I mad on the Help board and other boards were deleted. A first email about my problems was answered promptly with a generic comment, and the second email to [email protected] was dismissed with a flippant remark that the volume of mail was too high. They have not responded to other emails.

At that point, when I have tried to post a comment like, “What is going on” to the “Knol Bugs and Work-arounds” board I get the message, “Sorry! You have reached your daily quota for the action you are performing. Please try again tomorrow.” This has persisted for well over a month.

What is going on with this site? Is it the out and out debacle it is seems to be? I went online today and noticed that messages I left on the “Knol Bugs and Work-arounds” board were all deleted. In fact, there are only 30 messages on the board, since the first week of August. Who can believe that limited amount?

Undeniably believe that which you said. Your favorite justification seemed to be on the web the easiest thing to be aware of. I say to you, I certainly get irked while people consider worries that they just don’t know about. You managed to hit the nail upon the top and also defined out the whole thing without having side-effects , people can take a signal. Will probably be back to get more. Thanks

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